Spreading the big lie.

Bauerlein, Mark

Diane Ravitch The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn. Knopf, 255 pages, $24

At the 2001 convention of the Modern Language Association in New Orleans, a resolution was submitted to the Delegate Assembly denouncing standardized tests. Drafted by the Radical Caucus, it asserted that "'high-stakes' tests invariably discriminate against students from poor, working-class, and minority families," and that they "provide an ideological rationale for the perpetuation of inequality." The resolution passed 107-11.

Six months later, the quarterly Daedalus devoted an issue to the fairness of tests and similar topics. The former Department of Education official Diane Ravitch composed the lead article, "Education after the Culture Wars," and eleven scholars and practitioners responded. Ravitch's contribution grew out of her late-1990s experience at the National Assessment Governing Board, a federal agency that administers tests to U.S. students. What she discovered in her involvement with test-design, curriculum development, and textbook-adoption was a shock: a "sensitivity and bias" review process implemented by advocacy groups, publishers, and state agencies that stifles intellect, distorts history, bowdlerizes literature, levels all lifestyles and cultures (except white, male, European ones, which are culpable), and conceives reading and test-taking as training in egalitarian utopia. It sounds alarmist, but consider the acts of the system:

 --a 4th grade reading test whose sample passages
 "had a cumulative subtext: the hero was
 never a white boy";

 --an inspirational story of a blind man climbing
 a mountain censored because it implied
 that the blind face more hardships than the
 sighted;

 --a publisher who insisted that he couldn't
 include classic literature because "everything
 written before 1970 was rife with racism and
 sexism";

 --test questions that had to be regionally
 relevant, that is, no questions to Florida residents
 about snow, none to Nebraskans about
 the ocean;

 --a list of "forbidden stereotypes," including
 Irish policemen, African-American maids,
 Asian-American academics, "strong, brave,
 and silent" men, "weepy, fearful, and emotional"
 women, dependent elderly people;

 --no disturbing topics, including abortion,
 death, disease, violence, criminality, magic,
 and junk food;

 --a "contentless curriculum" acknowledging
 that "America lacks any common, shared culture
 worth preserving; that there are no particular
 literary works that should be read by all
 students; that historical studies are problematic
 insofar as they require students to memorize
 and recall certain facts."

That tests and textbooks must pass a politically-correct scrutiny didn't surprise a veteran such as Ravitch. But she hadn't realized how much sensitivity and bias review has shaped the business and theory of education, intimidating the publishing and testing industries and chasing content out of the classroom in favor of a skills-based, critical thinking pedagogy. (And what, one might well ask, are these content-deprived students going to exercise their critical thinking skills on?) To ward off protests from the National Organization of Women, publishers delete portrayals of passive women, and teachers keep silent about the human costs of single parentage. To keep Christian fundamentalists at bay, they avoid evolution, atheism, sin. Publishers have millions invested in a textbook series, and any publicity, is bad publicity threatening the next year's orders by procurement committees. Teachers have enough headaches without having to face an angry father over some bawdy lines in Shakespeare or the word "nigger" in Huck Finn. Homogenize the readings, tone down the content, remove hard facts, and voice nothing to which any group might object.

Ravitch's essay reveals that the rot of p.c. has reached the core logistics of U.S. schooling. Each step in the delivery of content has a filter, and textbook authors and illustrators, test psychometricians, county superintendents, and teachers step back and let them operate. Quotas are illegal in admissions and hiring, but they rule the table of contents in anthologies. Normally, evidence from reality trumps wish fulfillment, but, in today's textbooks and tests, when reality doesn't match desire, it is reality that must change (so octogenarians play sports and never falter; men nurse children, women never; women fix roofs, men never). Education used to entail "self-alienation," that is, the exploration of other worlds and lives so that one might grow out of a narrow adolescent identity, but sensitivity theorists reverse the process into the confirmation of identity, however group-bound and resentment-ridden.

One expects educators to resist the censors, but most respondents to Ravitch's essay seemed unfazed. A Harvard ed. school professor "can't share Ravitch's alarm," for he is "confident that bland textbooks will generate ones that stand out for their voice, conviction, and substance." (Note the reduction of ideological sanitation to blandness.) An ex-dean groans, "Ravitch's primal scream about the mess we are in is a familiar one: He then mutters a familiarity of his own: "which of us has the right in this sturdy democracy to say 'this will be the curriculum and the rest of you must go along with it'?" (Whenever a professional starts in on rights, expect a steep drop in quality.) A former American Historical Association president wonders, "will civil society be weaker in the future because schoolchildren learn different things in the classroom?" (Note the neutralization of p.c. materials to "different things.") Ex-MLA president Catharine Stimpson sneers that Ravitch's charges "may enable more conservative cultural warriors to pop her piece as an intellectual vitamin supplement," then has the nerve to declare that "progressives have championed" "institutional and intellectual diversity"--try testing that proposition at an MLA panel! A Boston school principal ignores the censorship and proclaims, "The old ethnocentric curriculum was not one whit more serious or thoughtful than the multicultural curriculum often favored today." (What to say to an educator who ranks Maya Angelou and Sandra Cisneros with Virgil and Emerson?)

The replies prove Ravitch's point. Sensitivity surveillance is not an infrequent outcry over an insidious stereotype. It is a word-control machinery stretching from classroom to board meeting to book-design studio, and the trustees of truth, tradition, and intellectual freedom countenance it.

We know why the peddlers of identity demand more and better representation of client-groups, and we know why testing services and publishers comply. But why does the censorship bother the educators so little? First, because educators have forsaken strict standards of historical accuracy and artistic excellence. Truth and beauty are mere ideological markers, and so condemning the Euro-African slave trade while ignoring the Arab-African slave trade is no more propagandistic than ranking Paradise Lost above The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Second, educators consider historical and literary content less important than the "critical thinking" of them. If, as one respondent maintains, whether students study the Ming dynasty or Thomas Jefferson matters little so long as they acquire the "more generative capacity to 'do history,'" then when a censor tinkers with the facts, well, so what?

Ravitch knows better than to contend theoretically with this pedagogy. Not even its manifest failures--lower reading scores, abysmal historical knowledge--can shake it loose. So, in her new book The Language Police, Ravitch expands the expose by sticking to its most indefensible practice, censorship in all its coercive, bizarre, and cynical workings. The bulk of the argument describes the review process in action, documenting its tortuous and trivial excisions, and judging the system squarely on its tactics. A report on a historic School for Negro Girls rejected because of the label negro; test passages on the supernatural removed because they upset Christian children; an informational reading about owls banned because owls are taboo to Navajos ... the absurdities accumulate. Chapters on "Censorship from the Right" and "Censorship from the Left" show that while left-wing attitudes prevail in the education establishment, right-wing groups have filed pesky lawsuits against counties and publishers. Every word and image of blacks, browns, females, and Third Worlders is scrubbed of dubious implication, and only when a Euro-male appears does the process let a judgment slip past, as in the McGraw-Hill guidelines which "express barely concealed rage against people of European ancestry." An appendix of proscribed words, images, and topics, plus a list of sensitivity and bias manuals, proves the case the Daedalus respondents pooh-poohed.

This is an insider's lament and a clarion call. Despite its recent spread and reformist poses, Ravitch concludes, the process has a longstanding aim: "not just to stop us from using objectionable words but to stop us from having objectionable thoughts." Its innovation is to apply ideological sculpting to the K-12 mind, within the well-funded enclave of the school. Indeed, that separation from society is crucial to p.c. education, an oppositional, disabusive scheme that allows the teaching of history and art on one condition: that the materials counteract the world outside, the racist, sexist, Eurocentric reality that is the U.S. past and present. Bias and sensitivity cast proper learning as unlearning, shaking off bad social habits and generalizations. Censorship takes the benign role of keeping the tools of teaching from replicating the prejudices and inequalities of the world. Hence, we have directives such as the MLA resolution noted above, a statement that censures tests not because they are technically flawed or misapplied, but because they do not dismantle social conditions.

The perverse thing about it all is how transparent and phony the system is. Sensitivity packages history and art and reality into a groovy multiculturalist fantasy and expects that the teens will absorb it whole. "The language police believe that reality follows language usage," Ravitch observes; they "have set their sights on controlling reality by changing the way it is presented in textbooks." To them, education is a simple matter of pouring approved words and images into soupy young consciousnesses. Identities are fragile, readers imitate what they read, minds assimilate what they see. If that's the case, though, educators can't hope to outlast the bombardment of media images and social actualities that they so deplore, for "nothing that happens in the classroom can compete with the powerful stimuli that [a student] can easily find on television, in the movies, on her CDs." If that isn't the case, if irony and skepticism infiltrate the adolescent brain in school and out ("teenagers' usual ability, to spot a scare"), then students will soon spot the system for what it is--a Big Lie. Reality will win, and p.c. pedagogy will collapse.

But the damage won't stop there. Student disrespect will pass to the entire educational mission and schools will become progressively isolated. This is the challenge Ravitch and other reformers face. Beyond the back rooms of bias review, PC theory and practice is universally despised, but how can we keep it from taking sound history and humanities down, too?